Shawbrook Festival 2016

The Shawbrook Festival 2016 celebrated music and dance over two weekends in May. Musical line-up for the BARN DANCE BEECH PARTY included Prison Love, St. Simeon & The Stylites and Bianca Fachel. The FOREST SAFARI saw audiences being led through the forest trails at sunset, and sunrise, to the outdoor forest stage to witness a stunning and hauntingly captivating performance byShawbrook Festival Dancer-in-residence Anamari (Viivi) Keskinen & co with members of the Shawbrook Youth Company, accompanied by Vetra Trinkunaite.

Festival Review FROM MUSIC BLOGGER ZOE FARRELL @MUSICWAND.

"Shawbrook Forest Dance Centre is one of the most idyllic, poetic and serene places that you could ever be in. It is unspoiled and its intimacy and charm is amplified by its own transformation...."

"There’s a secret in Longford, a sub-culture that the locals do their best to ignore until April of every year when it rears its shocking, scantily-clad, adrenalin-pumped head above the parapet, or, at least, out of the cattle sheds and converted milking parlour that it thrives in for most of the year. It’s called Longford Dance Fest and for sheer quirkiness and vivacity is unrivalled in the midlands. After experiencing it, the cultural Siberia of Ireland’s midlands never seems the same again. The festival is focused around the National Youth Dance Company who are based at Shawbrook - a dance school, which in itself is a surreal and elysian spot secreted away in a seemingly sedate farm on the edge of the bog near Legan."